


you and i

by heavyliesthecrown



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Tumblr Prompts, Winter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 11:52:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16932783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavyliesthecrown/pseuds/heavyliesthecrown
Summary: A collection of Tumblr prompts.





	1. red ribbon winner

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt - your car slid into a snowbank and i’m the mechanic that comes to tow you.

She’ll be the first to admit that she’s not a good driver.

She gets nervous easily. Thirty miles per hour feels like nothing in the back of an Uber, but it may as well be flying when she’s behind the wheel. And even more so when it’s dark and snowing out.

After a smattering of elongated ‘no’s’ and ‘why me’s’, a few minutes of pouting and banging her fists against the wheel pathetically, she draws in a deep breath and picks up her phone.

And after four tries, she gets him.

“Archie?” she says, leaning forward when she hears the line click. “Arch?”

“Whassit, Betty?”

He sounds drunk, she thinks. “I crashed into a snowbank.”

“Wha’?”

He’s drunk. “I crashed into a snowbank. Can you send someone to get me?”

“Wha’?” Archie repeats. “Who’s at the bank?”

“I need someone to pick me up!” she yells. “I’m near the Riverdale exit.”

“Oh,” Archie slurs, in a tone she’s not confident in at all. “Yeah. That’s – yeah. I’m coming. I’m on my way right-”

“No, not you!” she says. “Go find someone else.”

After another three rounds of back and forth, Archie says that he will. And so she waits.

 

 

When an hour passes, and no one shows up, Betty calls triple-A like she should’ve done at the very beginning.

Betty wishes she’d stayed home like she’d wanted to. She wishes she’d been able to make it home for Archie’s birthday this year so she could’ve had some excuse for not going to his Christmas party now. She wishes that she’d gone with her instinct and just taken a train instead of trying to do the right thing by using her fifty bucks in Zipcar credit.

But she’d figured that after her last Zipcar experience, the one that had been so wonderfully tainted with literal dog shit in the middle of the back seat, she owed it to herself to stick it to them, even if she is the world’s worst driver.

When she sees floodlights round the corner, growing steadily brighter as they draw closer to her, Betty pushes her car door open and steps out into the cold, waving her arms in its direction.

She doesn’t know why she does that. She knows that in all likelihood, they can see her just fine.

“I saw you,” the man tells her plainly, voice slightly muffled over the slam of his door.

She loves being right.

“I was just making sure.”

“This is you?” he asks, crouching as he examines her car. She might be seeing things – it’s dark and it’s cold and she’s tired – but she thinks she sees something of a mocking smirk on his face.

How dare he judge her and her terrible driving skills.

“It would seem, wouldn’t it?”

“What happened?”

Betty shrugs, hoping that it helps at least in some way with her nonchalance. “I swerved,” she says. “There was a deer in the middle of the road.”

At that, he narrows his eyes at her. “In the middle of the road?”

“Right there.”

“You know, you don’t hear of many deer around these parts.”

She’s going to submit the complaint of her lifetime about this yahoo when she gets to warmth and WiFi access. “You weren’t there.”

When he retreats back to the tow truck, shoulders hunched and hands stuffed into jacket pockets she doesn’t think is really appropriate for this weather, Betty chalks up a point to herself. She hadn’t been lying – there really was a deer in the road.

It just hadn’t really been close enough to her that she can justify the fact she’d crashed into the snowbank.

“Nice sweater,” he says when he returns to her and her rental, flashlight in hand. She can tell by his tone that he doesn’t mean that at all.

Luckily for her, he’s wearing perfectly good ammunition on his head, too. “Nice hat.”

“Isn’t it?” he says easily, crouching on his knees as he brings the light under her car. “Unique, right?”

A point for him.

As he mutters things to himself, things that she frankly doesn’t want to hear because she catches edges of phrases like ‘imaginary deer’ and ‘lousy driver,’ and it’ll all only serve to piss her off more, she jumps lightly in place, bouncing from one foot to the other to ward off the cold.

“Can I borrow your phone?” he asks, holding his hand out to her expectantly.

“What? No.”

“I need the light.”

“So? Use yours.”

“Can’t,” he says, with his head still tucked under her car as he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the exact phone she had in sixth grade, the one that she now knows as the Nokia brick.

She hadn’t even known those were still in service.

“Fine,” Betty relents, flicking her thumb up on her screen and turning on the light for him. The less he meddles with it, the better. Still, she crouches at his side, knees digging into the hard ground in protection of it, lest he start flipping through her photos.

Mostly of her cat, but they’re still private and personal and for her eyes only.

“You have to latch it,” Betty says, waving her hand in his general direction. It’s unhelpful in every way possible, because she knows he knows he has to latch it. “That part goes on that part.”

At that, he turns and looks at her, sideways in such a way she’s sure will have a crick settling in on his neck later. “I know that part goes on that part,” he tells her. “How do you know that part goes on that part?”

“I know cars,” Betty says, and even she’ll admit that she’d sounded a little prissier than she’d intended. 

“Just not how to drive them, apparently.”

“Excuse me? Where do you get off even thinking you have the right to-”

“Sorry,” he interrupts, and to his credit, he sounds it. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”

Betty forgives him, but because she’s still salty and she’s very cold, she simply nods in his direction.

After a few more minutes with his head tucked under her car, she hears him sigh. “I still can’t see.” His neck cracks loudly as he rolls it from side to side.

She could argue with him and insist emphatically that he can and that he’s just not trying hard enough, or that he try this and that, but there’s no use.

As it is, she can’t see either, and it’ll just be much quicker this way.

“Here,” Betty says, and with a sigh, she reaches her hand to her back and flicks her thumb over the battery pack there, lighting up the two red reindeer noses positioned prominently on either breast.

She can see very clearly now, and what’s right in her line of sight is his face, flooded over in red, and doing its utmost to not bark out laughter in her face. This guy, she thinks.

“How festive,” he says eventually, the corners of his mouth quirking and twitching as he does.

“It’s for an ugly Christmas sweater party.”

“Mmm.”

“I don’t normally dress like this.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay.”

“And before you judge it, I’ll have you know that it’s won competitions.”

He nods at her in what she knows is feigned seriousness. “How could it not?”

 

 

Her bright boobs do the trick.

“You can take it to the Riverdale garage,” she tells him. “It’s three blocks past Pop’s. It’s the diner with the big neon-”

“I know Pop’s,” he says. Then, almost shyly - “need a ride?”

At that, she looks around the empty road before shaking her head. “My friends are coming.”

To Archie’s front door when she rings it upwards of fourteen times after she’s trekked her way there in the cold by herself, her mind finishes.

“Tell them to watch out for the scary deer in the middle of the road when they do.”

This guy, she thinks again. “I sure will,” Betty says brightly.

He’s one foot into the tow when she decides that her pride really isn’t worth walking through the night.

Because he’d been right about one thing, although she’ll never tell him this – that she is scared of the deer, and it’s crossed her mind more than once that it just might make a reappearance at some point and come charging at her, sending her and her award-winning sweater flying in the air.

So she jogs to catch up and hops into the front seat as he’s turning the ignition.

“I’m cold,” Betty says by way of explanation when he looks at her with far too smug a face.

“Dasher and Dancer aren’t keeping you warm enough?” he asks, tipping his head towards her sweater before starting down the road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr - @heavy-lies-the-crown


	2. shoelaces

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt - i should’ve done my shopping a month ago but now i’m running around last minute and when i enter your store, i’m absolutely frazzled. help me.

Betty is lucky that she’s had so much training in putting on a smile she doesn’t really mean. It’s always been the Cooper way, a wide, pleasant grin and bright eyes, decoys that everything snarky and nefarious going on upstairs.

Her entire life has been in training for these moments. And really, she can’t complain about it – her ability to smile is making this all go a little easier.

She reminds herself to count herself amongst the lucky few. It’s unfortunate, a stroke of bad luck that she’s been saddled with the ‘we’re terribly sorry but we’re downsizing’ shtick so close to Christmas, but it happens, and to more people than just her. And she has this job now.

It may come along with the requirement that she wear this truly heinous Christmas bauble costume from nine-to-nine, but a job is a job. And on the upside, the costume is warm. She’s one of those perpetually frigid-to-the-bone people, and she can safely say she hasn’t felt cold once in this.

On the downside, she has to waddle. And when she needs to get upstairs or downstairs, which is always at this job, she has to take the service elevator since she doesn’t fit on the escalator.

But it’s fine, Betty thinks as she carries the box of tinsel out in front of her, shoulders straining with her reach. It’s all fine. It’ll be fine.

And it is, until without rhyme or reason, she’s laid out flat on her back and staring up at the ceiling with tinsel in her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she hears a voice rush out hurriedly. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t looking.”

In that moment, she imagines that this is exactly how a turtle must feel.

“It’s fine!” Betty says brightly, rolling from side to side. “No worries at all!”

Except the one related to how the hell she’s supposed to get up.

When a hand shoots in front of her face, she grasps at it willingly.

“I’m really sorry,” her tackler says again when she’s back on her feet and upright. Cute, she finds herself thinking. A nice face. “I hate shopping, and my sister’s coming tonight even though she said she wouldn’t be, and I usually leave my shopping for after Christmas since I really can’t deal with all this, and the sales are great then, and-”

“Hey,” Betty interrupts kindly. “Really, it’s okay.”

“Can I – I don’t know – help you with any of that?” he asks, gesturing around at the wayward tinsel on the ground, but he’s on his knees and swooping up the spilled mess before she can even agree.

She would’ve, though. Moving around in the monkey suit is hard.

“Last minute shopping, huh?” she says in an effort to make conversation.

He sighs. “Last minute everything. My sister has a habit of doing that. She thinks it’s some kind of positive personality trait.”

“Well, I think it’s sweet that you’re here now,” Betty says, tossing the last of the tinsel in the cardboard box before doing a quick sweep of the floor. To her right, there’s a little flat package on the ground that she’s just barely able to reach for before toppling all over again.

“Here are your,” she starts, feeling her cheeks heat as she hands back the package, “your… these.”

“What?” he asks as he takes it from her.

“What?”

“Is there a problem with these?”

“Of course not!” Betty says brightly. A little too brightly.

“You’re looking at them like there is.”

“It’s just-“ Betty sighs, letting her arms fall to her rounded sides. She feels another disciplinary warning about invasive client-contact coming her way already. “That’s just not really the kind of gift a brother gets his sister. But un-traditional gifts are good!” she throws in quickly. “Shatter the Christmas ceiling and all that.”

“Why wouldn’t I get this for my sister? They’re shoelaces.”

“Uh, no, they’re not,” she says. “Those are bra straps.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah,” she says, leaning over and pointing to the little clasps stuck to the back of the package, the clasps that always dig into her shoulders, “see, these parts here hook onto the front of the bra. These go on the back.”

“You’re sure these are… what you said?” he asks, doubtful. “Don’t those already come with straps?”

“Well, we stock these in the lingerie department, so,” Betty says, trailing off. “Is that not where you found them?”

The apples of his cheeks turn as red as the ornament she’s wearing around her torso, and she knows then that he had.

“It’s really the thought that counts,” Betty says in an effort to wipe away this perfect stranger’s dejection. “I’m sure she’ll like them.”

“I’d really rather not get my sister bra straps. That’s weirdly Freudian on too many levels.”

“Well,” she says, looking around. “Need a hand finding something else?”

She doesn’t know that she’s ever seen a man look at her with so much gratitude before. “Would you?”

Betty shrugs, feeling her body move awkwardly within the bauble-costume. “It’s what I’m here for.”

Betty starts towards the jewelry section, moving slowly enough for him to follow. She’s not particularly a jewelry girl herself, but at least she can get a better idea of what the guy’s sister might be into this way.

“So, I hope you don’t mind my saying this,” Betty begins, feeling a truly genuine smile rise to her face as he strides in time with her, “but for the record, shoelaces aren’t exactly a great Christmas gift from a brother to a sister, either.”


End file.
